Towards a good enough Legacy: the long term impact of London 2012

As London 2012 draws to a close the questions of Legacy and how to measure the Games' impact emerge as present tense issues. In this week's Friday essay Phil Cohen challenges the starting point of these discussions: the assumption that the population who use and will come to use the space all share the same vision as the narrowly selected development committee.

The Post Olympic debate should neither be limited to an inquest into what went right or wrong in the delivery nor extend into a soap
opera in which 2012 and its regeneration story never end. It should be a
genuine 'values tournament’, in
which the criteria we apply to judging such an event become the subject of a public
debate which is as much about the kind
of society we want to live in as it is
about the Olympics themselves[i].

Many of the East Enders I interviewed in the course of the research for my forthcoming book on the Olympic Legacy surprised me by saying that their strongest wish for 2012 was that ‘nothing bad
happened’. This was as true of those who
were enthusiastic at the prospect as
those who were anxious about it. At the
time I put this down to the fact that the terrorist bombing in London on the
day after the announcement that London
had won the bid was still quite
fresh in people’s minds. But this apprehension
persisted over the years and caused me
to think that perhaps it represented something more than the fear of some catastrophic incident. It might be
a defence against raising hopes for
something better that might not be
fulfilled. We are, after all, living in
a period of rising aspiration and falling expectation. It might
also be a way of saying that a 'good
enough Games’ would be one which was remembered for the sporting action, or possibly its Opening
and closing Ceremonies, and nothing else. It might be an implicit
retort to those for whom what happens
after the event is what counts in the long run.

We need to find a rational point of post Olympic closure, so that London 2012 does not turn into a shaggy dog story in which the tail does all
the wagging. Short of that it is a case of Olympics in Wonderland. Like the Dodo’s Caucus race, it is never
possible to know when it is over or who has won. So given that there is no ultimate arbiter – not even the IOC - of the
Games' economy of worth, and no final
judgement day, how can some conclusion,
however provisional, be reached?

If you ask a professional story teller how they know when
to stop, they will reply that every
story has its own in-built principle of parsimony. The Olympic story is no
exception. The periodicity of the Games furnishes an intrinsic punctuation point: every four years there is
a new Olympiad and a fresh chapter to relate. So far as London is concerned then, 2016 should
be the cut off point for the ‘Olympification’ process. Any new planning initiatives after that date should be regarded not as part of the 2012 aftermath but as a new beginning, something to be narrated and evaluated within a quite separate frame of reference,
so that the regeneration of East London can take new directions. For example in
terms of the future of Olympic Park, its redevelopment plan needs to be finalised over the next four
years so that the assets to be transferred to the host community can be
precisely determined. This does not mean, of course, the end
of the 2012 story – its narrative legacy
will continue to evolve as will its reputational status, and as long as there is an interpretive community of Olympics researchers to sustain it, the
debate about London’s Olympic heritage will go on. But it does mean
that we put a narrative frame around the
event and its legacy, which allows us to get them in some kind of historical
perspective. We need to understand 2012 as a specific moment or conjuncture that can be made sense of in terms of a process of longer
duration, namely the regeneration
of East London, without reducing its
legacy either to the highest common
factor, or lowest common denominator of this history.

For most Londoners and even for most of the rank and
file ‘twentytwelvers’, the Olympics will certainly be a moment to remember rather than a bench mark against
which to measure the rest of their lives. Just as a ‘good
enough parent’ is one who enables children to grow up and embark on life on their own terms with
reasonable optimism,[ii] so a
good enough Olympics is one that allows the generation of
‘twentytwelvers’ to build on their positive experiences and memories of the
event and move on to help build a world in which not everyone has to be an
athlete or a winner to enjoy the good things in life. The medal winning athletes, and
some of the Olygarchs who have
dedicated the last seven years of their
lives to making 2012 happen will find it
hardest to move on. For the rest of us ordinary mortals
it will be good enough to have been there and come away with a story to tell.

‘Itchicoo
Park it aint’

The Post
Olympic debate is inevitably focussed in the short term on the transformation of
the Olympic Park being co-ordinated by the Mayor’s London Legacy Development Corporation
(LLDC). It is worth looking at the composition of the Corporation’s board
of management, for it has its own story to tell about the priorities that are
likely to inform the project. The board
includes the usual suspects: some of the Olygarchs and key players in the 2012 delivery team, with a cross section of civic and corporate interests, supplemented
by specialists in marketing, and events /venue management, plus
the one mandatory local - black -media -business -woman. All the members of the
board are, in Robert Putnam’s terms, ‘
bridgers’, people who have worked
through partnerships in pursuing their
individual paths to success. The board has its fair share of power brokers and fixers, a few kibbitzers and even a schmoozer of two, but thankfully
no mishugeners[iii]. The chairman, Baroness Ford, is from a
banking background and despite the fact
that this is a public sector organisation, the private sector dominates the
board.

There is one social entrepreneur, Lord Mawson, whose career and outlook in some way exemplifies the
approach to regeneration which has been adopted. He started out as a clergyman
in an East End parish, but became
disenchanted with Labour’s welfare Statism which, in anticipation of David Cameron’s
critique of New Labourism, he saw as
creating a culture of dependency amongst the poor and weakening the bonds of civil society. Instead he advocated a form of bootstrap capitalism with a communitarian emphasis, and unlike Samuel
Smiles, practised what he preached, setting up the Bromley- by- Bow Health
Centre and running training programmes
for the local unemployed to help them set up their own small businesses. He
specialises in community engagement around large-scale regeneration projects and is a classic power broker cum fixer. He effortlessly bridged what gap there was between Thatcherism and
Blairism and was literally and metaphorically entitled to act as a spokesperson
for the ‘third sector’ in the counsels
of New Labour. Now, of course, he is a fervent support of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society[iv].

The Tories' localist policies always sat somewhat
uncomfortably within the dirigiste command structure of LOCOG and the ODA, although, of course, the Olympics
aspirational agenda was right up their street. But now in the Post Olympics there is an opportunity for them to demonstrate how Cameron-style localism works, how
bottom up regeneration can somehow be
achieved through, or despite, a top down
management structure. Unfortunately the
LLDC has fudged the issue. It would have
been entirely possible to invite representatives from the local Community Forum or the Stratford Renaissance Partnership, the local
regeneration consortium, to sit on
the board, and this would have sent a message that more than lip service was being paid to local interests. Instead the emphasis has been placed on establishing deeper forms of community consultation. For example, there is
a Youth Panel drawn from schools in the five Olympic Boroughs whose members get a
crash course in architectural, planning and regeneration issues, as well as in
advocacy and presentation skills, and who have made substantive inputs into
the designing of
youth provision for Olympic Park. There has also been an attempt at
building sustained relationships with local community organisations, especially
faith communities. Nevertheless all the strategic planning decisions about the
Park are to be made by the LLDC, yet another unelected quango of the very kind
that the Tories promised to abolish – and in the case of the Thames Gateway
Plan – actually did.

Imagined
Community

The American poet, Wallace Stevens, once famously
said that people live not in places, but in the description of places, and since its inception the Corporation has
gone in for some strenuous re-description of the Olympic site, drawing on much the same Panglossian vocabulary as the original
bid to promote their vision of the Park as offering the best of all possible urban worlds[v] :

Imagine the best of London, all in one place.
Tradition and innovation, side-by-side, in a landscape of quality family homes,
waterways, parklands and open spaces – anchored by the London 2012 Olympic and
Paralympic venues. The future Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will offer all of
this and more.

It will take the best of ‘old’ London – such
as terraced housing inspired by Georgian and Victorian architecture, set in
crescents and squares, within easy walking distance of a variety of parks and
open spaces.

It will take the best of ‘new’ London –
whether in terms of sport, sustainability or technology – to create a new
destination for business, leisure and life. Above all, the Park will be
inspired by London’s long history of ‘villages’, quality public spaces,
facilities and urban living, learning from the best of the past – to build
successful communities for families of the future. [vi]

So it’s a familiar story of
something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (i.e.
waterfront development), the tried and tested formula of what has been called
‘recombinant’ urbanism[vii], drawing on traditional vernacular architectural
idioms in conjunction with state
of the art construction and design technologies to
produce a post modern mix of built forms. The motif of the ‘urban village’ is
central to this concept:

Five new neighbourhoods will be established
around the Park, each with its own distinct character. Some residents will live
in modern squares and terraces, others will enjoy riverside living, with front
doors and gardens opening on to water. With the right mix of apartments and
houses, located close to the facilities communities need to develop and grow,
the Park will have the foundations to become a prosperous, vibrant new piece of
city.[viii]

The urban village is very
much an invented metropolitan tradition and refers primarily to working
class neighbourhoods in the inner city
which have either become gentrified, or
where the ‘gentry’ have always, or at
least since the 18th century, lived.[ix] Jane Jacobs, the American urbanist who was an apostle of ‘spontaneous
un-slumming’ saw the urban village as a model of piecemeal urban renewal in inner city areas threatened by ‘slash and burn’ redevelopment – an alternative
regeneration strategy led by small businesses rather than large
corporations[x]. More recently, environmentalists have adopted the urban village as a symbol of historical individuality threatened by the culturally homogenizing pressures of globalisation, as
well as a model of local democracy and sustainable community development[xi]. Amidst cries of ‘there goes the neighbourhood’ as yet another
Waterstones or Starbucks opens, the ‘small is beautiful’ school of urbanism has
made significant inroads into both popular attitudes and professional planning
practice over the last decade[xii].

Even though it is not in
fact an appropriate model for the
Olympic Park given the very different circumstances of its conception, something of this philosophy has undoubtedly rubbed off on the Park designers. One of the
features that gives the urban village its distinctive cosmopolitan atmosphere
is the presence of artists. The Development Corporation has the ambition to make the Olympic Park into a new cultural quarter, ‘a bit of Hoxton and a bit of the South
Bank’ was how one Olygarch described it,
and, as such, a home and workplace for East London’s growing creative class of artists, designers, and media folk. They are a relatively
new phenomenon, not least in their mode of attachment to place[xiii].
For although they are global go-getters, constantly on the move, and definitely ‘going places' , they are as concerned with the cultural assets which make an area desirable as they are with the market value of their property; the aesthetics of a neighbourhood are as important to them as its material amenities, transport connectedness
and social status, and their mobile
privatism is tempered by their environmental concerns[xiv]. As we
saw in the case of Hackney Wick, cultural quarters that grow through a process of spontaneous unslumming, are initially pioneered by an avant garde of young impecunious community artists and small
creative enterprises who tend, sooner rather than later, to be
displaced as advertising executives and the bigger media companies move in. In the case of the Olympic Park it is difficult to envisage that the street artists displaced from ‘The
Wick’ will be affordably rehoused in what used to the Olympic Media Centre but is now scheduled for
commercial use.

The fact that
gentrification is very much the name of the Olympic Park game is underscored by
its residential strategy. The legacy plan promises a 70/30 split between privately owned housing for affluent
professionals and ‘affordable
housing’ that in principle is available
to lower income groups. In fact recent
measures introduced by the government have stretched the concept of affordability upwards to include middle income groups
whilst at the same time hiking
subsidised rents up to 80% of
market rents which will put them well
beyond the pockets of the poor. In some cases even the 70/30 cut is qualified by the cautionary ‘if
viable’. In East Village, the first of
the new neighbourhoods, the housing association has promised that it will be
‘nearly impossible’ to tell the difference between privately rented homes and the social rents and that its style of management will be ‘tenure
blind’. Unfortunately the signs and
symbols of social distinction are not
confined to architecture and the narcissism of minor differences can
defy even the most egalitarian housing policy . No amount of ‘pepperpotting' can deprive door knockers, cars, prams, gardens, the presence or absence of
curtains, and external decor of the tale they have to tell in a community whose social radar is attuned to differential status. Finally the eight to ten
thousand jobs that it is claimed the Park will eventually create will be overwhelmingly concentrated in the
knowledge economy, financial and professional services and the cultural industries giving a further boost to the gentrification
process, with a smaller number of people employed in the low wage, low skill
sectors, primarily in the local hotel, catering, retail trades, or as office cleaners, site
maintenance and security staff.

There is a crude enough spatial logic to this dual
economy. The professional services class thrown up by the new
economy needs another kind of service class to look after it; it needs people to wash,
cook and clean for it; to mend its equipment, service its cars, mind its children and pets, minister to its recreational needs, staff
its shops, wine bars and restaurants,
improve its houses, fix its drains, and populate its neighbourhoods with
a little local colour. This is precisely the role assigned to the post-industrial working class for whom the Olympic Park will provide some limited
accommodation.[xv].

The persistence of class distinctions is glossed over in the LLDC prospectus in a number of ways. Firstly by the re-iteration that
much of the housing will be for families and that ‘family values’ will prevail in the design of public amenities. In
fact in the context of the housing market
a family home is simply a large house that has
three or more bedrooms and which may just as easily be occupied by a
single childless but affluent owner. The
possibility that many of the apartments will become company flats, as happened
in the Barbican, another prestigious housing development linked to a cultural
centre, or that the new housing will become a buy to rent investment opportunity, as has occurred in the Royal Docks, cannot be ruled out.

Secondly there is a great
deal of talk about social inclusivity,
but what this turns out to mean is that the site will have disability access
and housing designed for life time occupation, including special provision for
senior citizens. While this is
admirable, it rather dodges the issue that socio economic status will
continue to regulate and restrict access to these facilities; there is no sense
in which this project could be regarded as redistributive in its effect on local
housing classes. It is wheelchair access, not social access that is the
priority here. The outcome is more likely to be yet another example
of what has been called ‘splintering urbanism’, offering a
further prospect on global opportunity
structures for those who are already
fully paid up members of the ‘network
society’, while those who are dependent on the local, or informal economy or the State
remain a marginal, even if not actively marginalized, presence[xvi].

The strongest feature of
the plan is its neighbourhood structure which owes more than a little to Ebenezer
Howard’s vision of the garden city, with
housing, schools, shops, health and community centres and public space, including children’s
playgrounds, all closely integrated into the urban fabric. There is no doubt
that, taken as whole, it represents a
significant advance on any previous Post
Olympic site development. The only pity
is that the main beneficiaries are
likely to be wealthy investors and middle class gentrifiers, rather than local East Enders.

Welcome to heterotopia

Much is made in the LLDC prospectus of the fact that the Park is an important public
amenity for locals as well as a tourist
destination for visitors to London. Here is how a day out in the Park is
imagined :

A day
in the Park might start with a coffee and toast, soaking in the views of the
Park and the striking 2012 Games venues. Your morning could feature a trip up
the ArcelorMittal Orbit – to see the remarkable panorama across London –
followed by some retail therapy at Westfield Stratford City. Lunchtime could
include some exercise at one of the sports venues or some street art in the
open spaces that will feature an exciting line-up of activities and
performance. Your afternoon could be full of sport, whether trying your hand at
BMX at the Velo park or watching world champions at the Aquatics Centre or the
Stadium. To finish the day, you could enjoy
dinner at one of the Park’s restaurants – or head to Brick Lane, Green Street
or other East London hotspots to enjoy local music and cuisine.

This ‘visitor’ is nothing if not an all rounder, combining the tastes of flaneur, sightseer, sports enthusiast, shopaholic, fitness freak, gourmet and BMX biker all in one! But actually this little scenario is very
revealing about what kind of public space is being envisaged. It is what
Michel Foucault has called a ‘heterotopia’, an ‘other’ space which juxtaposes in a single place a multiplicity
of sites that are in themselves
normally incompatible in scale and
function and belong to quite different urban realms: the shop, the
stadium, the garden, the
observational tower, the terraced house,
the pleasure ground [xvii]. Heteropias can be exciting and fun but not everyone wants all the different
elements of city life compressed –or jumbled up – in one space.

In any
case what most people enjoy doing in a park on a fine summer's day is nothing much: picnicking, sun bathing, flirting. reading,
listening to music, or just sitting
around gossiping, while for those more actively inclined throwing a Frisbee or kicking a ball about is the
summit of their athletic ambition. There should be plenty of scope for all this
relaxed (in)activity in the Olympic Park,
especially in the ecological Northern
Park which includes wetlands, woodlands and
meadows, at least until required
for commercial development. Still it
is a bit worrying – and symptomatic of
the aspirational ‘get fit’ Olympic agenda the Park is supposed to embody - that none of the promotional videos or artists impressions
actually show people just lying around
on the grass. They are either striding purposefully about, doing or watching sport, or jogging, no doubt egged on by Monica Monvicini’s giant installation 'Run':

There is another sense in which ‘otherness’ has been given a local
resonance in the LLDC publicity. The frequent mention of ‘East London
hotspots’ with their local music and
cuisine, and similar references to events which will ‘showcase local
diversity and heritage’ suggests that if East Enders have
a walk on part in the Post Olympic spectacle it is to add a little local colour to the Park ‘experience’ by
performing their cultures for the benefit of passing trade. It is the familiar ‘order in variety’ formula
of British style multiculturalism:
a governing elite, here the Development Corporation, provides the order- in this case the
planning framework -while the ‘ethnics’,
the ‘locals’, the ‘people’, the ‘others’ furnish the variety in the urban mise
en scene[xviii].

From a design standpoint the layout of the Park, its configuration of venues and
connecting paths and open spaces draws
explicitly on the tradition of English landscape
gardening; but here order
in variety is applied to the overall
planning concept: the variety is provided by the sports venues, each of which has a
distinctive architectural identity and the order – or at least the
harmonious confusion- is produced by the landscaping. The Park’s chief design consultant, and now advisor to
the LLDC, Ricky Burdett, is quite up
front about the fact that no co-ordinated ‘one size fits all’ design brief was imposed on the architects
and that they were encouraged to ‘do
their own thing’. He describes the result as ‘fragmented but organic’, an aptly
post modern model for the style of urbanism the Park represents [xix].

In this best of all
possible worlds there is no tension
between the local and the global.
The Park is advertised as a ‘global
attraction’ with the Orbital Tower as one of the ‘wonders of London’ and a must see for visitors, while in the same breath, or in the case of the
promotional video, with the flit of a butterfly wing, we are sitting in a quiet
quasi-suburban garden having tea. The possibility that residents may get a little tired of being constantly
ogled and photographed as they mow their lawns by crowds of Post Olympic tourists does not seem to have
crossed the minds of the site imagineers, or perhaps they consider it a minor
inconvenience, part of a price worth paying for being part of such a prestigious development on such a famous
site. So too the proposed International Quarter, which consists of a ‘gold plated’ development
featuring office blocks, hotels and luxury apartments in Stratford City, towers over the ex-Olympic village
without a backward glance at the
prospectus and its claim that the commitment to create intimate
living space has not been sacrificed to
economies of scale.

Place making: from terminal architecture to dwelling place

The most ambitious and problematic aspect of the project is the
attempt to integrate the legacy sports venues within an emergent urban fabric constructed around residential communities, and
what are somewhat euphemistically called ‘employment hubs’. Sports stadia by their sheer physical
size, and the fact that they remain empty for much of the time, and then
briefly flood an area with a
multitudinous and often vociferous
population of spectators, exert an unsettling and even uncanny effect on their
neighbourhoods[xx]. In the case of the Olympic Park, the fate of the Stadium, the biggest material asset, or in
some views, liability, as well as the
symbolic flagship of the whole enterprise, has come to focus public anxieties about the long term viability of the
2012 project. The difficulty in finding
a tenant, and a sustainable post Olympic use has conjured up visions of other
Olympic venues which have turned into
ghost towns, haunted by their former glory, their only function to serve as
cautionary monuments to the public
folly or hubris that built them. The spectacle of the derelict and vandalised remains of the Athens Games is still just too close for comfort.

The prophets of doom have an ally in W.G. Sebald
whose jaundiced view of ‘grand projects’ belongs to a long tradition of gloomy prognostication about urbanistic adventures :

It is
often our mightiest projects that betray
the degree of our insecurity. We gaze at
them in wonder, a kind of wonder which
is itself a form of dawning horror, for we know somehow by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of
their own destruction before them and
are designated from the first with an eye to their later existence as
ruins.[xxi]

Perhaps fortunately there is nothing awesome
about the 2012 stadium. It is a good
example of what has been called ‘terminal architecture’[xxii] – a huge oval shed for accommodating spectators and athletes with the
maximum efficiency and minimum of fuss; as such it is indistinguishable from dozens of similar
structures, in combining the envelope functionality of the aircraft hanger
with the
palatial uselessness of the
architectural folly and the spiritual hydraulics of a cathedral where people come to worship sport[xxiii]. It is a non place, a transit zone, a space of flows[xxiv]. But it is a very special kind of non-place,
because although it does not in itself generate any sense of local attachment, the Stadium is the epicentre of a global mediascape
organised around the Games, while for
those who attend the events it hosts, it
serves as a focal point of post Olympic memory work as well as a place of
pilgrimage for Olympophiles.

The original plan was for the stadium to be ‘deconstructed’ after the Games, an operation
which has nothing to do with its critical appraisal as an urban text but is a polite name for demolition. It was
only subsequently that it was decided to make it into a legacy venue. Now the problem is that it
requires costly modification to make it fit for longer term purpose. A
bad case of not thinking things through
and ending up with the worst of both worlds.

Undoubtedly
it was the primacy given to legacy in the bid that changed the stadium brief. The hard fact is that the Olympics are a travelling circus but because
they have to justify their role by establishing permanent assets for the host city, they
cannot exploit the opportunity to
develop a new style of temporary architecture. It is entirely
feasible to construct stadia that
are fully demountable. British architects lead the world in
designing such structures, and ever since the advent of the
‘Archigram’ group in the 1960’s
with their project for a ‘throwaway’
architecture, buildings that can be
instantly erected to provide temporary
shelter, or stage one off events have been the focus of experimentation. From
geodesic domes to pneumatic auditoria,
such structures have been at the leading
edge of new developments in design and engineering. They offer a strategic solution to a major legacy problem created by the need to
put up buildings that really have little or no post Olympic use: simply take them down and move them on to the
next Olympic venue. The structures could be commissioned and owned by the
IOC and leased to host cities as and when required. To
‘ephemeralise’ the Olympic infrastructure in this way would not only reduce
the cost of staging the Games and put them within the reach of a far wider
range of cities and nations, but restore to them their properly transient,
inter-ludic, role. After all, part of
the excitement of a travelling circus when it comes to town stems from the fact
that it creates an evanescent
environment dedicated to transient
pleasures.

As it stands,(sic) 2012
Legacy Inc is in some difficulties. The
purpose built International Media
Centre may have to be demolished, the Aquatic
Centre cannot be transformed into a
recreational swimming pool for local community use and the Main Stadium is pledged to remain as a field
and track athletics venue, hosting the occasional mega event, plus concerts
and festivals, which means it will be drastically underused. London already has a world class
athletics stadium in the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace, and
numerous other stadia, including
Wembley, that can stage large scale open air events. The LLDC still puts a brave face on its
future :

Everyone’s an athlete. The magic and spirit
of the world’s greatest sporting festival will live on in the Park’s five
sporting venues. In the South Park, the two main London 2012 venues – the
Stadium and the Aquatics Centre – will be at the heart of an exciting new
visitor experience.

To place the two premium sites whose futures are the most
problematic at the heart of the ‘visitor experience’ would seem to be
inviting trouble, but what is interesting is the way the notion of ‘Olympic
heritage’ is here pressed into service to legitimate the fact that the legacy venues will in practice be monopolized by elite athletes, and with the exception of the BMX and mountain bike tracks, be of
little interest to local communities,
despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

What is symptomatically
missing from the LLDC vision is any
recognition that the urban fabric is made up of the stories woven into, around
and about it by those who dwell there; yet it is through this protracted process that spaces become places with
a specific local meaning and identity.[xxv] For example planners may designate a certain
space as a ‘public square’ but it may
gain a public reputation as a hang out
for drug dealers, or youth gangs and become off limits to children and senior
citizens. The proposed ‘British Garden’
may become, however temporarily, a carnal cruising ground: 'Meet you in the Gold' meaning something quite different from ‘see you in Bronze’. Particular groups will in any case establish little niches for themselves in the Olympic Park, usually in places where planners least expect it. Skateboarders
may take up residence in front of the
Aquatic Centre because the street furniture there offers them acrobatic scope. The Stadium may become a
magnet for graffiti artists who
want to leave their personal mark on the
Olympics in revenge for the appropriation of their art form for the 2012
logo…..

New Directions Home?

Olympic legacies have in the past become the subject of bitter dispute and
recrimination[xxvi]. If the assets of the Olympic Park are not to turn
into a liability – become a poisoned chalice or a bone of contention - then the fact that their transfer is in the gift of the LLDC and that the community’s claim to entitlement remains at best provisional, should not be
allowed to interfere with developing a
robust ‘bottom up’ regeneration
strategy. If 2012 is truly to earn its
laurels as the ‘Legacy Games’ then the creation of a political framework within which its terms of reference and the issues arising can be can continuously discussed, worked through and decided upon by those most directly
affected, would seem to be a sine qua non. A good enough legacy is one which is actively owned and
controlled by its legatees.

What the Stadium saga tells us is just how important symbolic stake holding can be in determining
material outcomes. The LLDC plan for the Park
takes it for granted that the
population who move in to live and work there will share their vision. Their imagined community
seems to consist of urban pioneers like themselves. Why else
would they be there? So although the Park is conceived as an elaborate piece of social engineering, no strategy of community development has been put in place. It is simply assumed that
communities will spontaneously arise in each neighbourhood[xxvii]. This may well not be the case. Tenants and residents associations,
bringing together all tenure categories, will need to be actively
encouraged to counteract the
culture of mobile privatism amongst
the more affluent and the social divisions that might otherwise
surface. The growth of good inter-neighbourhood relations clearly
requires more that the provision of
concierges who know how to fix bicycles. The setting up of some broader framework
which can also address issues relating to the Park’s outward facing
functions is essential. But what form
should this take?

One of the positives to
come out of the Big Society debate was a
renewal of interest in mutualism and models of direct or participatory democracy. If the so called ‘Red Tories’
could so easily steal some of their best
ideas from the Left, it was because the Left had
largely ignored its own home grown
tradition of communitarianism[xxviii]. Now the works of G.D.H. Cole
and the Guild Socialists have been taken down
from the shelves in the Museum of Labour History, dusted off and given a
new lease of life as part of a
revitalized discussion about redistributive forms of governance. If the localist agenda is to be more than
window dressing then it must involve strengthening intermediate institutions
between market and state through a real devolution of power to them. In what
amounts to a new township with an
eventual resident and working population
of nearly 20,000 there is an opportunity to experiment with a new
participatory form of urban governance.

For this purpose the delivery of the Legacy Communities Scheme
needs to be handed over to a Community Land Trust through which strategic management powers can
be vested in an annually elected
board, with all residents and
workers entitled to vote. Already there
is a proposal that one of the neighbourhoods should be managed in this way, but this needs to be
extended to the Park as a whole. The
Land Trust decides development policy and its AGM becomes a popular assembly with a
plebiscitary function more akin to what
the Guild Socialists had in mind than
the glorified committee cum business meeting it usually is. Within this scenario
the LLDC would retain residuary planning
powers related to the development of the
Park’s public profile as an Olympic
heritage site and tourist destination as
well as remaining responsible for the
wider aspects of Olympic regeneration. But the essential issues affecting those
who live and work on the site would be determined by no-one but themselves.

[i] Values tournament is a term
coined by the sociologist Max
Weber to refer to events whose latent meaning
or function is to stage a confrontation between competing belief or value
systems. For the application of this
concept to the Olympics see A Guttmann The Olympics: a history
of the modern games (1992)

[ii] See D.W. Winnicott The
Child, the family and the Outside World (1964)

[iii] For the distinction between ‘bonders’ and ‘bridgers’ see R Putnam Bowling
Alone (2000).

[iv] See the contributions to J Mackay
(ed) The age of voluntarism: how
we got the ‘Big Society’ (2011)

[v] For a discussion of post Olympic
urbanism see C Rutheiser Imagineering
Atlanta: the politics of space in the city of dreams (1996). On urban
Imagineering in general see S Lukas The Themed Space: locating culture, nation, self ( 2007) and K Hetherington Capitalism’s
eye: cultural space and the commodity (2008)

[ix] See T Butler
and G Robson London Calling: the
middle classes and the remaking of inner London. (2003).See glossary for
further discussion on gentrification.

[x] Jane Jacobs The Life and death of great American Cities
( 1987) and for a positive appraisal of her approach A Alexiou Jane
Jacobs : urban Visionary (2009)

[xi] See A Magnaghi The
Urban Village :a charter for local democracy and sustainable development (2005)

[xii] See the contributions to E
Charlesworth(ed) City Edge; case studies
in contemporary urbanism. (2005)

[xiii] See R Florida Cities and the
Creative Class (1995). The
definition of this ‘class’ has proved as elastic as that of ‘creative industry’. In some usages it
includes estate agents and hairdressers, in others it is confined to those
working in traditionally defined areas
of the arts See also C Landry The Creative City.(1995)

[xiv] The term was coined by Raymond Williams. See The
Raymond Williams reader edited J
Higgins (2001)

[xv] See N Buck et al Working Capital: life and labour in contemporary London(2002) and T
A Hutton The New economy of the inner city (2008)

[xxii] See Martin Pawley Terminal
Architecture (1998) - a concept he uses to describe structures whose design is entirely
determined by their function of
containing large numbers of people or goods. For a critical overview of these developments see A King
Spaces of Global Cultures:
Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004).

[xxiii] See R Trumpbour The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in
the History of Stadium Construction (2007). For a detailed advocacy
see R
Sheard, (2005) The Stadium: architecture for the new global
culture ( 2005).

[xxiv] See M Auge Non
Places : an introdoction to the anthropology of hypermodernity (2008)

[xxv] For current research on place making and narrative landscapes
see the contributions to S
Daniels et al Envisioning landscape, making worlds:
geography and the humanities (2011)

[xxvi] See for example the discussion about Atlanta in
C Rutheiser op cit

[xxvii] See B Elliott Constructing Community : configurations of the
social in contemporary philosophy and urbanism
(2010)

[xxviii]
See P Blond Red Tory :how the left and right have broken Britain and how we can fix
it (2010). On Guild Socialism see G
D H Cole Guild Socialism(1934) and J
Vowls From corporatism to workers control: the formation of British Guild
Socialism (1980)

About the author

Phil Cohen is managing editor of Livingmaps Review, an on line journal of critical cartography which launches in November. His recent books include On the Wrong Side of the Track:East London and the Post Olympics (Lawrence and Wishart 2013) and Reading Room Only: memoir of a radical bibliophile (Five Leaves 2013). Further information: www.philcohenworks.com and www.livingmaps.org

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